Think Outside the Auditorium with an Audience Response System

At CLiKAPAD, we’re quite used to our Audience Response Systems helping speakers on the main stage, whether they’re leading a workshop, pitching a new product or giving an interactive presentation. What we’ve been seeing a little more of lately is event managers choosing to use our handsets in less crowded areas, like breakout spaces.

A key benefit of CLiKAPAD voting handsets is how easy they make it to collect data from hundreds (or even thousands) of people at once, however there is nothing that stops them from being used in smaller, more intimate groups. In fact, the anonymity they provide often makes them a better tool for gleaning feedback than a paper survey or a face-to-face conversation.

The benefits of a breakout survey

Splitting your audience into smaller groups allows you to make them feel more involved with the conversation, and is likely to produce better engagement rates for your data. It breaks the monotony from being “talked at”, and provides the opportunity for them to ask direct questions that they may not be comfortable asking in the main auditorium. If your goal is to gather information and create a meaningful dialogue with your audience, this is how.

How to incorporate breakout surveys into your event

The most important thing is to schedule dedicated time(s) for your audience members to get together to discuss what they’ve just listened to. Don’t expect to hold their attention if you simply hijack a much-needed coffee break!

Whether you choose to conduct polls at different intervals throughout the day, or plan to run surveys in multiple breakout spaces at once is up to you, and probably depends on the duration and content of the main event. The flexibility of an Audience Response System means that just about any kind of data capture and management is possible, depending on what exactly you want to find you.

For example, consider how you will divide your participants up – do you want to separate them up into specific demographic criteria, or leave the groups mixed? You will be able to use the CLiKAPAD software to review data from each session separately if you prefer, or combine it together to analyse the bigger picture.